By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard
Published: Friday, March 30, 2007
Peace activists seeking an immediate end to the Iraq war were kicked out of Sen. Gordon Smith’s Eugene office on Thursday afternoon, arrested by Homeland Security officers, handcuffed and escorted from the U.S. Courthouse.
The three Eugene activists had said they planned to stay in Smith’s office until the senator agreed to sign a pledge to cut all funding for the war. Like many other activists who have participated nationally in what is being called the Occupation Project, they expected to get arrested at 5 p.m. when the federal building is closed to the public.
But Smith’s staff couldn’t wait that long. Sometime in the early afternoon, they asked Carol Melia, Karla Cohen and Michael Williams to pipe down. Since arriving in Smith’s spacious new office in the courthouse at 11 a.m., the three would sound a single note on a pitch pipe and bang two sticks known as claves together once every four minutes to mark the death of another war victim. The four-minute interval represented the rate of death of Iraqis and Americans since the war began in 2003, Melia said. After the musical note, one of the group would read the name of a U.S. soldier killed in the past month.
After a couple of hours, staff members asked them to stop, Melia said.
“We continued but were quiet about it. I apologized for any inconvenience,” she said. But at the next clink of the claves, one of Smith’s staff members asked for the Homeland Security officers who guard the building to remove the protesters.
“They were friendly and gentle and kind,” Melia said of the officers. “They were careful to not hurt us.”
The three were escorted to the basement sometime between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., taken out to the loading dock, issued citations for failing to comply with lawful directions and released. Out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, a couple of dozen peace activists carried banners calling for an end to the war.
Melia said she was willing to be arrested because she wants her elected officials to understand the seriousness of her concerns.
A therapist and Quaker, Melia says she has the Oregon congressional delegation on her speed dial. She has called and written letters and attended vigils.
She said she appreciated Smith for breaking ranks with Republicans to support the current war spending bill that would set a date for bringing soldiers home in 2008, but she wants more.
“I would love to inspire Gordon Smith to stand up and have the courage I know he has to end this war now,” she said.
Staff members in Smith’s Eugene office have a long-standing policy of directing all questions from reporters to the senator’s Washington, D.C., office.
Smith spokeswoman Lindsay Jackson, reached by phone early in the afternoon, said the senator hadn’t had a chance to consider the activists’ request, but values input from his constituents and receives a high volume of correspondence from them.
